I was riding in an ATV on my way to Memorial Stadium in Champaign-Urbana to get to the finish line of a 10K race event. In order to get there before the first finishers we scooted down a back road. I shot this from the back of the ATV, high shutter speed and ISO and a great deal of good luck. The sky wasn’t that precise blue and the shadows weren’t quite that long, but it felt like the end of day. The sunlight on the silo spoke of night coming and something special in the air. So that is how I processed it.

Shady dealin’, midnight trippin’ is my way of life. The dishwater dawn is my time of day. The next toke is my only friend. Total obedience is the price of admission. A faith born in terror, it ends in the relentless cold.

Tomorrow never comes. Innocence dies by inches as if to the raggedy beat of a breaking heart. Dreams die hard here. The dead are the lucky ones. Life is long but death is for fuckin’ ever.

So bring on the seizures and the shakes, the chest pounding jammers and the flat-out sick fear of shadows, windows, sunlight and the dark. It ain’t a choice to hit the pipe when I can’t stand up, when my heart is outside my body, when I’m pukin’ blood, even then, because I know the each and every toke takes me right…there.

Sometimes, like tonight, my best friend’s best friend walks through the door and tells me that I am hittin’ it too hard.

“Well, I keep seeing this stuff and it just comes a-rolling in/And you know it blows right through me like a ball and chain…” Bob Dylan said that. Apparently it is a Bob Dylan kinda day. Mostly I take pictures of people running; mostly I do it on the trails and in the high country. Sometimes I go to the high sage desert or some flat land mirage. But sometimes all I can see are the people who are not there. The empty seats and the overgrown grass, the listing fences and rolling clouds speak to me of spring time goin’ summer somewhere else, the next generation of the ‘boys of summer’ finding another “field of dreams” on which to slide toward old age. A dyin’ stadium is filled with ghosts and some mornings they are my only companions on the early morning run into the sunrise. I stop sometimes and listen close. I pretend to hear the hot dog vendors and smell the popcorn but mostly I just keep runnin’ because the ghosts aren’t out there, are they, and they aren’t waitin’ around. It ain’t sad and Lord knows it ain’t lonely come sunrise out here, it’s just another day on the road to wherever it is I am goin’.

Passed through Wendover, Utah on my way to the Salt Flats to shoot a 100 mile race. Not much of anything on this side of town to speak of except for some broken down warehouses, what appeared to be a dock loading area and some shanty like structures that might have been houses and the town jail. Then I noticed the daycare center. What you can’t see is the strip of glitz casinos on the other side of the border in Nevada. Over here the wage earners from sin make a life. Bleak but apparently not without soul.